Outer Banks (6 page)

“Grammy found out about it and really let me have it; you'd have thought I was bound for hell that minute. But you know, it seemed as much like church to me as any service I've ever been to,” she said.

She told me about the rich, dense ecosystem of the Tidewater, and about the stars and the clouds and the wild things of the Chesapeake. Cecie's curiosity about and love for the natural world was a living thing. She told me about her garden at home in the cove. She was passionate about that. Our room swam perpetually in a fetid green miasma of hanging and potted plants, and she is the only person I have ever known who really could root and grow splendid, shining plants from avocado pits. She talked to them all, sometimes in light, rapid convent French.

In return, I told her about sailing and tennis and horses and the East. I did not think it was a fair trade even then. I never thought to tell her about my life in Kenmore. To me it was no more real by then than something I had read in a book, long ago.

 

The one thing that Cecie and I did not talk about, except obliquely and with an ersatz veneer of weary sophistication, was sex. Here we were, I am convinced, unique, at least within the perimeters of Randolph University. All around us, in dormitory and sorority rooms, in parked cars and on blankets out at the lake and in fraternity party rooms, everyone talked of It and a good many did
It. Despite the fact that pregnancy loomed like a glittering killer iceberg, and every quarter a few girls dropped out of school and disappeared from view, or married in haste and pretended it was a matter of glorious Impulse, sex was the universal obsession and the motive power behind all our music and dancing, the market impulse behind the sales of Fire and Ice lipstick and Tonis and Peter Pans and Listerine—the reason many of us were in college at all.

Looking back, it seems to me that on any given night the very campus rocked, quietly and cosmically, like Emma Bovary's carriage. I don't think the advent of The Pill, a few years later, resulted in many more instances of the Black Act and the Dirty Deed. I just think it wiped out a great deal of the monthly breathheld terror. It was not always possible to tell who was Doing It; if you were, you did not admit it, and the raw evidence of beard burn and hickies and ravenously smeared lipstick could just as well mean HP…heavy petting, an amenity permissible and even expected of pinned and engaged girls. There were no sanctions at all against the boys at Randolph. It was simply assumed that every boy who wanted to, did, whenever the urge struck. Since most of the girls denied it, I suppose we assumed that the guys were getting it from the same small group of rosy roundheels, but somehow the subject never came up. Guys did, we didn't…or did and said we didn't.
Simplis in extremis.

But Cecie and I simply never talked of it. Oh, we learned and sang the raunchy songs with relish, and made the right noises when we were part of a group who was talking about it. Sooner or later every group did; where there were three or more of us gathered together in Its name, there It was also. Cecie would blow twin plumes of Pall Mall smoke through her nostrils, something it had taken her months of choking and coughing to master, when Ginger came crashing exuberantly into our room smeared from forehead to knee with lipstick caroling, “Yum, that SAE Bets fixed me up with is hot to trot.”

“You've really got both feet in the trough tonight, Fowler,”
Cecie would drawl, and Ginger would burble with laughter. She relished physical touching the way a puppy did romping, and sought it, I expect, in the same happy-go-lucky spirit. We never knew just how far she went, but it was impossible to censure her for it. As well to censure a golden setter joyfully romping out of the water, shaking himself.

And I was able to say, world-wearily and through half-lowered lids, “It's even better with a little Bailey's Beach sand thrown in,” when someone spoke slyly of an evening of making out. And everyone would laugh, and the looks that were thrown at me under Maybellined lashes told me that I was considered sophisticated in the extreme, undoubtedly a veteran of who knew what Kama Sutric Eastern excesses.

Even Fig Newton sometimes got into the act, with the grace of a charging rhino. One night she wiggled her toes in our faces and sang out, “Look, I shaved them. Makes them fun to suck.”

“Ugh, Fig, YUCK,” we shouted her down.

“Well, Sister does it,” she said defensively.

“I'd as soon suck a rotten persimmon,” Cecie said later that night, when we were alone. “Do you think Sister really does shave her toes?”

“She says she does,” I said.

“Does Franklin really…you know, suck them?”

“I guess he does,” I said. “Why on earth else would you shave them?”

Cecie gave the small all-over shiver that meant, with her, disgust and annoyance.

“The convent looks better and better,” she said.

I think she more than half meant it. It's hard to say what a convent education does to young women on the deepest level; later I would meet many who seemed much the wilder and more wanton for theirs, as if each overtly physical act had a double meaning, the one that informed it in the moment and the one that
said to the sisters, many long dead,
“That
to you, and
that,
and
that!”
But there was not much doubt what it had done to Cecie. About sex, as about other things to a lesser degree, she was chaste and remote. And it somehow annoyed her. After we read
Lady Chatterley's Lover
and
The Tropic of Cancer,
this time not aloud, she said, “I don't think it would be half so bad if you weren't expected to make those noises…during it. And if you could just do it in utter darkness and privacy, and not talk endlessly about it. But it just sounds messy and loud and somehow public, and there's no way it can be graceful. What a shame there's no other way to get children.”

“You don't have to be loud or public about it,” I said, amused. “Who says you do? Lord, Cecie, for all we know it's as graceful as
Swan Lake.
How do you know what it looks like?”

“Because I do,” she said. “Somehow I know it looks just like that what's-her-name in Henry Miller's book, who pulled up her dress and did it to herself in the middle of the Tottenham Court Road.
God!
Not me, no thank you.”

And I think she did mean that. Marriage and children were not in any of our talk at night, not even an alliance of any sort. Sometimes we made vague talk about Great Loves, and the suffering they entailed, but if we got more specific than that, we set foot on a heavily mined path that led inevitably to It, and we fled from it. She shied away, I am certain, out of a deep fastidiousness of soul. I shied out of embarrassment and fear of the ensuing entanglement. In my mind, It meant, inevitably, marriage, and that meant that strange, duplicitous, abyss-dance that had linked my father and mother.

And so I was able to say, when she said, “No thank you,” “Amen.” But I wondered about sex, endlessly and sometimes near obsessively. I would lie in bed at night, after we had turned off our lights, and move around two anonymous, androgynous figures in my head like cutout paper dolls, trying this position and that, and
I still could not quite figure out what you actually did. Who gets on top of who? If it's him, does he mash the breath out of her? If it's her, how does it get up in her? I had seen male genitalia only in paintings and statues, cozy, chunky bundles that dangled straight down. Even if he lay on top, how would he get it inside her? And then what? Does that stuff come right out into her, or do you have to wait for it; is it like pushing the button on a can of shaving cream? Do they move? Does he? Does she? How do you know when it's over?

And the questions at the heart of it all: Does it hurt, and will I want to?

It did not seem likely to me, on those nights, that I would ever learn the answers, though common sense told me that one day even I would cross that damp chasm between those who had done It and those who had not. But my heart didn't believe it. Meanwhile, there was Romance and Impulse, and songs to be sung…while we were young…

And so we talked, if we talked of the future at all, about careers, and what we would do after school. I planned to go straight to New York and plunge myself into the esoteric world of Eames and Bertoia and Saarinen furniture and rich, thick textiles and bright, explosive abstract paintings and cool, sculpted white houses by the sea. Cecie meant to go through Duke Law, pass the Virginia bar, and then take off for a couple of years and roam the world before settling down to practice some nebulous, unnamed branch of law in an old house on the shore where water light danced on walls and ceilings and the tide slapped hollowly under a silver-gray dock. Neither of us thought how we would get from graduation day to those distant, shining futures, but neither of us doubted that the worlds of international design and law would welcome us with open arms. Our grades, after all, were exemplary.

“Come with me to Europe before we start to work,” she
would say. “It won't cost anything; we'll backpack and get jobs along the way if we need to.”

“You come to New York with me,” I replied. “You can practice out on Long Island if you have to have water and gray shingles, and I can come out on weekends, and we can earn enough to go to Europe in style.”

“You're going to be perfectly happy to find somewhere wonderful and stay, Kate,” she said. “But I'm always going to want to see what's around the next turn.”

It was a simplistic prophecy, but I thought at the time it probably had a grain of truth in it. I also thought that somehow, when all was said and done, Cecie and I would stay close to each other through our lives. It was what you do think, in the middle of those devouring early friendships. That it is simply ludicrous to think that anything, even marriage, even death, can broach them, such is their power and sweetness.

Cecie was always the one of us who had doubts about that.

“You're going to meet somebody and get pinned and then married,” she would say. “You've just got that look about you, no matter what you say. It's not that you don't date. You just haven't found anybody with any sense yet. Wait till you do.”

“Not now,” I said. “Not yet. I date just for fun now. There isn't anybody at Randolph I'm interested in. Besides, you date, too.”

She did; and in spite—or perhaps because of—the Lee nose and the so-called Eastern la-di-da, so did I. They were, for the most part, as I had said: light, easy, spindrift alliances, borne up on gusts of laughter and music and the elaborately, ostentatiously romantic things we devised to do. We danced one night on the lawn of the president's formal rose garden to the music of “Moonglow” on the car radio, and fell in love, not with the boys who had brought us there, but with the idea of it all. We drank Lancer's and Mateuse and Rhine wine on blankets by the starpricked
water of Lake Randolph, and went to fraternity formals in clouds of net and tulle bellied out over clanking plastic hoops, and we got huge, bulbous yellow chrysanthemums on football weekends, with fraternity letters tricked out in scattered glitter on them, and purple and white orchids for our wrists on formal weekends, and went to Destin and Panama City for house parties, and we laughed light laughter and sang and danced, and kissed light kisses. And none of it touched us to our cores; all of it blew about us like feathers in a summer zephyr.

A few times I got fairly serious about someone, most likely a brooding loner in the school of architecture on the G.I. Bill. Once I dated, for a quarter or so, the president-elect of the student body, and was so flown with myself that I went about mooing about first ladies, and bought a hideous lipstick called First Lady Pink. It took only one snort from Cecie to bring me out of that. I threw the lipstick away.

But when the affair ended, as it was predestined to do, I was briefly and badly hurt, and took to walking the campus at night in the November cold, alone, my hands jammed in my raincoat pockets. Cecie may have wanted to snort, but she did not, then. On the night that the fever of sorrow snapped I prowled for hours in a downpour and Cecie walked beside me, hands jammed into the pockets of
her
yellow slicker. She did not snort and she did not speak. She simply matched me, stride for stride, which, considering her short legs, took some doing. Neither of us was unaware of the drama of it all. Finally I turned to her, water running down my face, and said, “This is really stupid, isn't it?”

“It really is,” she said. “But it's better than cancer.”

I looked down at her, her face shadowed under the dripping rainhat, and then burst into laughter. She did too. We laughed until we had to hold each other up, and then we walked in the rain to Pennington's Drugstore and had hot chocolates. We had to stop several times on the way, doubled up once more with laughter, and we were still laughing when we crawled, sodden
and chilled, into our beds. It became the talisman we invoked whenever sorrow struck, or the abyss stirred and howled beneath our feet.

“Well, it's better than cancer.”

Oh, Cecie. It is. It is.

A
FTER
Alan went back into the studio I stayed in the garden for another hour. It is a secret one now, walled away from the beach, the houses on either side of us, and the road in front by dunes and a weathered fence and tall shrubs and whatever else I could coax into life in the constant rush of salt off the Atlantic. I began the garden when we moved into the house in Sagaponack, the year after we married. It was just a small beach shack then, a weathered gray cube among far grander houses around it, and it sported not a petal or a leaf that was not wild. But it had a magnificent view of the entire sweep of the South Shore from the upstairs crow's nest we added, and the dunes that shielded the first story from the sea were the tallest and wildest on all that coast. I started the garden before we even moved in.

At first I had a rich sweep of perennials in the border behind the dunes and beach plum, and I built up a tier of weathered
wooden boxes and tubs so that passersby on the beach below could see them far above, like pennons on a rampart. We planted black pines, sedum, juniper and glossy privet to shield the deck and garden from the punishing torrents of salt wind, but I kept them shaped and clipped. Outside, on the dunes, were beach grass and sea oats, beach morning glory and sea rocket and dune spurge and panic grass…a subtle palette of wild gray-green that set off to perfection my carefully nurtured perennials. I hauled black soil and compost and fertilizer all one summer, and the next I had yarrow and bellflowers and delphiniums and lilies and iris and geraniums and feverfew and a full spectrum of the gaudy poppies. I loved the flowers and loved showing them off; we began our series of deck parties even before the house had a proper kitchen. I hauled food and liquor and ice out to Sagaponack from Bridgehampton and sometimes Manhattan for three summers, and everyone we knew and some we didn't came to have drinks in my twilight garden by the sea. I always loved my flowers best when the pearl-gray evening light ignited their colors to radiance. Stephen was just-born then, and the garden was a celebration, a destination. I was not even aware when it became a fortress.

When I had my first miscarriage I stopped some of the parties and let the shrubs grow wild, for I could not seem to get my strength back that summer. Two years later, when our daughter was stillborn, I enclosed the side approaches from the road to the garden in privet hedges. After that you could get to it only from the house, but you could still see the flames of the perennials from the beach, and I worked as assiduously to cultivate the garden for just the three of us as I had when passersby regularly saw it. We still had an occasional party, and our guests still loved my garden.

When Stephen died I let the black pines grow tall and wild and the juniper overrun the side yards, and we did not have the parties anymore. When they found the ovarian cancer and I came home from that first surgery, and the chemo that followed, I took down the tiers of tubs and pots that were visible from the beach,
and put up the fence, and concentrated on my borders. It was about that time that I tired of perennials, and began replacing them with the annuals I have now. There were two exploratory surgeries after that, both with negative results, and the acute fear I had felt at first slid into chronic anxiety and then over into a kind of level white peace that was most pronounced when I was in the garden. Soon I was spending most of my daylight hours there. In winter I spent them at my desk in the alcove off the living room, that looked directly onto the sleeping garden. That was nearly five years ago, and all the perennials are gone now except the poppies. Now I have blanket flower, annual phlox, gazania, lantana, gerberer daisies, purslane, larkspur, statice, zinnias, marigolds, blackeyed susans, and a glorious rank of sunflowers, like sentinels, like Swiss guards at the Vatican. Each autumn I rip them out. Each spring I replant them.

“Don't you think it's okay now to plan further ahead than three months?” Alan said last spring, when I came home from the nursery with the bedding plants. “It's been four and a half years. In October you'll be officially cured. You can afford to look ahead now. I miss the iris and the lilies, and I miss seeing the colors from the beach. Now, when you're down there, it's like there's nothing at all up here behind the dunes. Those flowers always had a nice, go-to-hell look about them: look, world, Kate and Alan Abrams are up here.”

“Is that what you think I'm doing?” I said. “Refusing to look ahead?”

“I know you are,” he said. “You've been doing it for almost five years. I could understand it for a while, even if I didn't think it was exactly healthy, but there's just not any reason to do it now. You're virtually well. You need to get on with your life. We need to make some plans. We need to get you out of this fortress back here. It's beautiful, but it doesn't make a life, Kate.”

A little cold wind breathed up out of the abyss, that I had buried deep these past months in a grave of flowers and solitude.

“Don't push me, Alan,” I said. “I want to wait a little while. It hasn't been five years yet.”

“Katie, dear love. It's been okay for four and a half years. It's going to be okay this time. Why is it that you can accept bad news so much more easily than you can good?”

“Let's just see what happens,” I said, and he left it at that. Alan is one of the other half, the ones who have never walked the bridge over the abyss. He listens with fierce sympathy when I talk of it, and tries with all his good, bright being to impart to me his innate feelings of safety and optimism, but he simply does not know what I know, what the abyss-walkers know.

One thing I have always known, since they found the cancer, is that the Pacmen were ultimately going to get me, and I am fairly sure now that it will be sooner rather than later. It's how I always pictured the cancer cells inside me, like those maniacally teeming, ravenous little round heads in the witless electronic game, all blind gobbling mouths. In the beginning I actually thought I could feel them there, darting and shooting about like terrible reverse sperm, bearing death rather than life, gobbling, gobbling. Even after the surgeries and the rounds of chemo, I fancied that they were still at it in there, down in that fertile red darkness. Then, gradually, I simply stopped feeling them or much of anything else; as the years and the exploratories and the checkups passed and the results came back negative, the garden and the still, suspended white peace claimed me and I had no sense of them at their busywork.

But one morning this July I woke and thought, simply, They're back, and by nightfall I was convinced of it, and I have known it ever since. There are no other symptoms, but it is my body and my abyss, and I know what I know. The Pacmen are on the march, and I do not think I can go through it again. Not another surgery, not another of the terrible, wracking rounds of chemotherapy, not another siege of baldness, not another night spent staring into thick, dead darkness, not another day swinging
from hope to despair a hundred times between sunup and nightfall. I can't and I won't.

I have not told Alan. He would not believe me, anyway.

“You have no way of knowing that without seeing McCracken,” he would say, and he would have me there, in that airy, elegant office on Madison that still stinks, to me, of that first terror, before I knew what had hit me. So I will not tell him. This way, there are almost two months left before my checkup. Two months of the autumn light that is so magical out here, the clear golds and blues, the high, honey sun and nights literally swarming with stars, and the great sweeps of space and emptiness without the summer crowds. Two months of just the darkening blue of the sea and the bright, hot tan of the sand and the great autumn skies, with the last butterflies teeming in the sun and the migratory birds sweeping over on their way south. Two months of the garden. It will be wonderful; it will be enough.

I finished with the witch grass and started in on the dodder that threatens always to choke the daisies and zinnias. The sun beat down on my head and the tops of my shoulders; from the angle I knew it was long past noon, and I ought to go inside and shower and make lunch. But I lingered, listening for the roar of the sea that always increases when the tide turns. But it was very still, and I could not hear the ocean, only that great diffuse hum you sometimes hear out here at the end of Long Island when the crowds are gone, that has always seemed to me the voice of the earth itself.

And over it, unbidden, unwanted, unheard for many years, other voices out of another time. I shook my head, but they would not go away. Finally I sat back on my heels and let them come: Cecie's voice, and Ginger's, and Fig's. And Paul's…

 

I almost killed Fig Newton the day I first saw her. I came very near to running over her in the MG. I had been down to the little
Victorian Randolph train station to pick up Cecie, who had just come in from Virginia, and we were late for the last chapter meeting before rush started. It promised to be irredeemably awful; everybody was tired from two weeks of non-stop rehearsing skits and songs and polishing silver and cleaning the house until it shone, and we were drained and white-bled from the heat. It was the worst early fall I could remember. The temperatures were still grinding into the very high nineties, and the humidity on Randolph's fecund plain was nearly that. But it did not rain; day after day dawned white and set gray from heat, and water was restricted, and electric fans droned themselves into smoking, screeching suicide. Nothing on campus was air conditioned then, except the drugstore and the movie house and the Student Union. Those of us who had come back early for pre-rush had slept, if we slept at all, under towels wrung out in tap water, in the tepid rush of the fans. Every other one of us had a summer cold.

I was thick-nosed and miserable and running sweat in stockings and high heels and a tight-belted cotton dress. Traditionally, the last chapter meeting before rush was a “dress” meeting with the Tri Os; nobody remembered why, since its sole purpose was to review the bids that had gone out and wade through the incendiary matter of legacies, those “must-takes” of whom it was usually said, by the insisting alumna, “She's a legacy, and a lovely girl, and loves Tri Omega better than life itself.” We would end up bidding all our legacies of course, and in the end would come to accept, if not cherish, most of them. But it never happened without a floor fight that went on until all hours, and the reasons for dressing for that feline fray were lost in the mists of history. It virtually assured that everyone would be miserable and mean, thus prolonging what was at best a bad business. I was in a vicious mood, and jerked the MG squalling around corners. Beside me, Cecie grabbed the seat and grimaced.

“Look, if you think you can do it better, you're welcome to it,” I snapped. “We're going to miss the stupid prayer and the
stupid roll call because your stupid train was late, and Trish is going to say something sweet and shitty, and I really may kill her this time. God, Cecie, I wish you'd learn to drive.”

She was silent, and remorse flooded me. Cecie did not have a car, of course; the aunts were far too poor for that. Many girls at Randolph did not, but Cecie was the only one I had ever met who did not know how to drive, and did not want to learn.

“I'd kill everybody in a ten-mile radius,” she said lightly, when one or another of us offered to teach her. “Y'all drive and I'll pay for the gas.”

And she did try to do that, though most of us wouldn't let her. It was a subject of mild annoyance to the chapter and to me, until one day when I was battling a wasp and cried, “Take the wheel, Cecie,” and she did, and when I had ousted the intruder and took it from her again and looked over at her, she was paper-white and shaking all over and wet with sweat. Her hair and clothes were sopping with it.

“It's always been that way,” she said, not looking at me. “I guess it has something to do with the accident. I don't know why; I can't remember it. But it's the only explanation I can think of.”

After that I did not tax her with it. The fear had been a terrible thing to see.

“Sorry,” I said, on that blistering day. “It's just been so damned hot, and it won't let up, and I think dressing for this meeting is the silliest…”

“Look out!” Cecie cried, and I wrenched the car to the left and a short, thick figure scuttled back onto the curb. I slammed on brakes and pulled up at the first of Randolph's two traffic lights and glared at my victim. My heart was pounding, and my ears rang.

“Sorry,” the girl sang out, and smiled gaily. “That's a pretty car. I wouldn't mind being hit by that car.”

Cecie and I simply stared at her. The street corner was momentarily empty. In the merciless white light of afternoon she was grotesque, there was no other word for it. She was very short,
almost as short as Cecie, but massive and square. Her head was large and appeared larger because of an appalling permanent that looked as though she had fashioned for herself a helmet of well-worn Brillo; it slid into her shoulders with only a passing nod to a neck. Her face was large and her eyes, behind quarter-inch-thick pink harlequin glasses, swam like a bug's. All her features sat in the middle of her face as though drawn there by a first-grader. Her nose was pugged far past pertness, and her eyebrows almost met over her eyes. She wore, incredibly, a ruffled, off-the-shoulder red peasant blouse and a flowered, ankle-length skirt over many crinolines, and her non-waist was cinched in with a red elastic belt. She wore red high-heeled pumps on feet that, Cecie said later, looked like Alley Oop's, and red earrings that dangled from her lobes to her shoulders. She resembled nothing so much as a dwarf peering out of a heap of clothing tossed on the sidewalk by a Gypsy. Her voice was an affected trill. Looking at her was like looking at something both comic and sad, as clowns have always seemed to me. I wanted to avert my eyes.